Crossed Wires

Crossed Wires

After the latest debacle on Triton, Alice was sent back to Earth. On a grey Monday morning she found herself in a laboratory at Academy headquarters. Rain drummed wearily on the windows. Bespectacled gargoyles lurked in corners.

"Do you know what that is, Alice?" asked Simmons. He gestured at a three metre high metal construction of levers and wheels and pipes which stood in the centre of the laboratory. Somewhere in the region where its belly button would have been, if it had possessed a belly button, was a smooth grey metal door, like an oven door.

"It looks like a 3D printer," said Alice. Thinking that this was going to be some sort of job interview, she'd come in her best dress suit, and was feeling slightly offended that Simmons hadn't made the same effort. He was wearing a lab coat with two missing buttons and a torn pocket.

"That's right," said Simmons. "That is the most advanced 3D printer in the world. Or, at least, it's the most advanced 3D printer the Academy could afford. Actually, it's not that either. But it's the best we've got."

"I see."

"I suppose you know the Academy have got this idea about building a miniature fusion drive?"

"I know," nodded Alice. Images of Triton flickered through her mind. Frost and shadow. She tried to focus on what Simmons was saying.

"They think they're going to tour the solar system with a drive the size of a pocket calculator," he continued. "The latest idea is to dispense with the conventional manufacturing techniques altogether and create it with a printer. They think it'll be easier to make all the fiddly little bits that way."

"I see."

"Fine-tuning the programming is turning out to be more of a challenge than we'd anticipated. None of the simulations we've run so far have produced anything that would be remotely useable. So we've got somebody in to focus on the programming. The guy who's assistant you're going to be. He's very bright."

"I'm looking forward to meeting him," said Alice.

Simmons paused for a moment before adding: "He's a little odd, though. It's only fair to warn you."

"Odd?"

"It's best if you meet him yourself," said Simmons, turning towards the door.

Alice followed him down a twilit corridor where the paint peeled from the walls. Outside, featureless dark grey buildings huddled in the rain. Between them, Alice could see glimpses of windswept moors. The clacking of her heels echoed in the empty corridor.

"He was an outstanding student, by all accounts," said Simmons over his shoulder as he plodded ahead of her. "If a little introverted. His parents were famous physicists and travelled around the world a lot - a year here, a year there - so I suppose he never made any lasting friendships. Things really started to get weird when he was at university. He was there for two terms and then he was kicked out because he didn't attend any lectures or seminars. He wouldn't speak to his tutors. Just refused to interact. He went back home and shut himself in his room for eighteen months. When they finally dragged him out they discovered he'd developed a completely new kind of string theory. All by himself."

"How am I going to work with him?" asked Alice, watching the rain running down the windows. Simmons seemed not to hear the question.

"He ended up here because he did one of the Academy's online aptitude tests and his score was astronomical. Highest they've ever seen. So they took him in and gave him a job. Between you and me, I'm not sure it was a good idea. The memory of his socks on the day he arrived will haunt me to my grave. Anyway, his name's Isaac. Like I said, his parents were both physicists, so you can probably figure that one out."

They came to a door, on which there was a plaque which read: 'Programming Suite B5'. Simmons knocked and went in. Alice followed him into a dim room with half a dozen antique computers.

A thin figure was sitting at one of the work stations. His face was smooth and narrow and so pale that it was almost ghostly. He wore frayed jeans a couple of sizes too big and a grey sweatshirt that was stained down the front. His long, bony fingers darted over the keyboard. His work station was surrounded by ragged piles of papers and manuals. Several coffee cups and a soup bowl teetered on the edge of the desk. Loose cables writhed across the floor. The man didn't look up when Alice and Simmons walked in. The staccato rustle of the keyboard as his fingers ran over it filled the room. Whenever he paused, the pattering of the rain on the window filled the silence.

"Isaac," said Simmons, "this is Alice, your new assistant."

"Hello, Isaac," smiled Alice.

Isaac didn't reply, or even look at Alice. He continued staring at his monitor. His face gleamed like wax in the pale glow from the screen. His fingers scurried on across the keyboard. Alice looked askance at Simmons.

"It may take a little time for him to warm up to you," said Simmons. "He doesn't really do conversation. In the meantime, you'll want to familiarise yourself with the specifications of the drive we're aiming to produce."

Hi picked up a bulky manual from the desk and handed it to Alice. Feeling its weight, Alice judged it to be about eight hundred pages long.

"What exactly do you want me to do here?" she asked.

Simmons made a vague gesture with his hand, as if swatting away a trivial question.

"Just try to work with him. You can help to relay the specifications to him as he's programming." He nodded at the manual in Alice's hand and added: "He doesn't seem to like reading very much. Anyway, I'll let you know more when we're about to run the next simulation."

He turned towards the door. Just as he was leaving he looked back at Alice and added, in a low voice, "You know, Alice, I think what he really needs is encouragement."

Then he was gone.

Alice turned back towards Isaac and stood for a moment with the manual in her hand. Isaac typed, eyes on the screen. An ageing radiator gurgled sadly. Alice flipped through the manual. She had been right; it was just over eight hundred pages long. It was full of statistics and technical diagrams and closely written text. She dropped it on the desk.

"Well," she said brightly, "I don't know about you, but I could use a cup of coffee. Can I get you something while I'm going to the canteen?"

"Tacos," said Isaac in a childlike voice, without looking up from the screen.

"Alright," said Alice. "I'll see what I can do. Be right back."

Brilliant, she thought, as she hurried down the corridor. He spoke to me. That's a breakthrough.

When she walked into the canteen it was empty apart from two men murmuring in a corner. They glanced up at her as he entered. Plastic tables and chairs were scattered randomly. In the kitchen somebody was shaking a pepper pot into a large pan of soup. Alice sneezed and ordered a cup of coffee. She asked if they had any tacos.

"What are tacos?" said the stout lady behind the serving counter.

Alice carried her coffee back to the programming suite.

"I'm sorry," she said to Isaac, "They don't seem to serve tacos here."

"I know," said Isaac.

"Then why did you...? Oh, never mind. Let's have a look at the manual."

Two hours later she was in Simmons' office. He was sitting behind his desk with a bacon sandwich.

"I'm sorry," she said, sitting down. "I'm not happy."

"Neither am I," said Simmons. "Thirty years ago I thought I was going to be a prize-winning physicist. Now look at me: stuck in a dead end job, debts, losing my hair..."

He bit into the sandwich and brown sauce squeezed from between the bread slices.

"He won't speak to me," said Alice. "He won't even look at me. How can I work with somebody like that?"

"He's very shy," nodded Simmons.

"He's more than shy," said Alice. "I'm starting to wish I was back on Triton."

"Believe it or not, he's actually taking to you very well," said Simmons. "Two hours is the longest anybody has managed so far without some kind of breakdown."

He bit into his bacon sandwich again. His unshaven jowls worked over his collar as he chewed. A glut of brown sauce had oozed to the edge of the sandwich and was hanging, ready to drop.

"I mean," said Alice, "what am I supposed to be doing here?"

"Give it time," said Simmons through a mouthful of bacon. "He'll warm up."

"The sauce - " said Alice, pointing. It was too late. The glob of sauce fell and detonated on the edge of Simmons' desk, splattering his shirt and keyboard with a burst of smaller drops. Simmons swore, dropped the sandwich, and dabbed at the mess with a dirty handkerchief. Alice found herself wondering what the correct name for the offspring of a drop was. Droplets? Driplets? Dribbles? And did the process count as asexual reproduction? She took a deep breath and stifled a giggle. It all seemed unreal.

"Look," said Simmons when he'd finished dabbing, "give it a little longer. We'd really appreciate it."

"I was told I'd be somebody's research assistant."

"I know it's not exactly what you were expecting. But Isaac really needs somebody around. Listen, we're about to run a simulation." He nodded at his screen. "Isaac's submitted a programme."

"You can see that?"

"Yes. You'll be able to as well, as soon as they set up your login details. Which reminds me, I must get on the IT guys about that. Anyway, once we've run the simulation you can convey the feedback to Isaac while he works on the next version. That'll give you something to go on."

"Why do you run simulations?" Alice asked. "Why not just print every time?"

"Too expensive," said Simmons. "We're not going to print until he's got it right. Come on. Let's go to the lab."

In the laboratory a group of technicians were gathered around a dim monitor. Simmons joined them and pushed through to the front. Angular geometrical symbols waltzed across the screen. Simmons and his colleagues muttered excitedly. Alice studied the 3D printer, letting her eyes run over its grey surfaces and along its dully gleaming pipes. Simmons came over and handed her a sheaf of paper.

"That's the feedback from the simulation," he said. "Basically, not enough juice. We need more power."

Alice leafed through the pages.

"You want me to feed this back to Isaac on my own?"

"Yeah. He doesn't react well to groups of people." Simmons waved a hand at the huddle of scientists behind them. "In fact, he doesn't react well to any of us individually."

"Why did they employ somebody like that?"

"Like I said," Simmons shrugged, "he's brilliant."

Alice went back to the programming suite. She sat down next to Isaac.

"I've got the feedback from the latest feedback," she said. "Basically, there's not enough juice. We need more power."

Isaac began to type. He typed for about fifteen minutes, his long fingers scurrying over the keys. Finally he finished and rested his hands on the edge of the desk.

"More power," he said.

"Well done," said Alice.

Over the next two days she worked with Isaac. Somehow, without speaking, they established a routine. Alice would read a passage from the feedback report which Simmons has given her. Then Isaac would type, implementing the changes. Alice was given a login and was able to follow Isaac's progress at the next work station. At first she was lost, but as the hours passed she caught glimpses of his purposes. He was using basic programming languages; stuff which she'd seen before. But he was using them incredibly fast. She'd never seen anybody work as such speed. He could spot a problem, formulate a solution and implement it in seconds, where anybody else would have had to ponder for hours. She began to understand why the Academy had hired him.

Another simulation was run, two days after the first.

"Good," said Simmons, "but it has very high power requirements. We need him to modify it so that it doesn't need as much current."
         
Alice took the report which Simmons handed to her. She went back to Isaac's programming suite and the process began again. She talked, Isaac typed. Hours became days. He barely spoke to her. But just occasionally, when she got up to open a window or fetch some coffee, she noticed his eyes following her around the room, as if something had risen from a dark depth inside him and was peeping shyly out. It was there for a brief moment. Then Isaac was typing again, eyes on the screen.

Further simulations were run. None of them were quite right. Something always seemed to be missing. Nevertheless, Simmons insisted that they would soon have a good enough design to print an actual miniature fusion drive.

"We'll all be able to visit Pluto," he said. "I might even move there permanently."

Early one morning Alice was curled in her armchair in her room, cradling her first cup of coffee in her hands, when there was a knock on her apartment door. She looked at her watch: it was eleven minutes past six. She wasn't due to start work until eight.

"What?" she mumbled. She dragged herself out of the armchair, wrapped her dressing gown tightly around herself, and stumbled to the door. It was the stout lady from the canteen.

"Can you come and see to your friend? He's mucking about in the kitchen."

"You mean Isaac?"

"The skinny one, whatever his name is."

"What's he doing?"

"He's fiddling with the microwave. He's got the back off it and he's poking about inside with a screwdriver. He won't listen to me. Won't even look at me."

"Oh...okay...I'll be there in five minutes."

Alice quickly got dressed, took a last swig of her coffee, and hurried to the canteen. The stout lady ushered her through to the kitchen. Alice picked her way between ovens and fryers. She found Isaac bending over a microwave oven with a screwdriver in his hand. He had refitted the back cover and was tightening the screws.

"What are you doing, Isaac?"

Isaac straightened up, startled. He glanced at Alice then looked at the floor. Alice thought she detected a pink glow on his normally white cheeks.

"What are you doing?" she repeated.

Isaac looked from the floor to the window to the ceiling then back to the floor.

"Tacos," he mumbled.

"Isaac, you can't produce tacos by messing about with the microwave," Alice said. "What were you thinking? Come on."

She guided him back to the door of his apartment.

"In you go," she said. "Don't go wandering about again. Have some corn flakes. I'll see you at eight."

Isaac went inside a without a word and shut the door behind him. The incident wasn't mentioned again.

Two weeks and five simulations passed. One slow afternoon Alice had her feet up on the desk and was texting a friend with her right hand while holding a slice of lemon sponge cake in her left. Isaac was working on something. Simmons walked in without warning.

"I'm working," said Alice, bringing her feet down hurriedly. "I'm just taking a break."

"We're going to print the fusion drive," said Simmons. "We're running out of funds and they've told me to hurry things up. The last simulation was close enough. You can both come and watch."

They followed him through grey corridors to the main laboratory. All of Simmons' minions were there, clicking at keyboards and wafting sheets of paper and whispering to each other. Simmons consulted with two or three of them.

"Alright," he said, "here we go."

With a mock flourish he hit a key on a keyboard. For a moment nothing happened. Then the printer came to life. It began to hum and wheeze. Lights blinked and flickered. Levers tilted and wheels spun. The whole thing groaned and trembled. Everybody watched. Five minutes passed.

"How long will it take?" Alice whispered to Simmons, feeling that to speak aloud at that point would have been somehow disrespectful.

"I've no idea," Simmons whispered back. "We've never done this before."

Another five minutes passed, and another. Simmons and the other scientists watched with open mouths. Isaac, too, seemed transfixed, his smooth, pale fixtures taut with tension. Alice sneaked a glance at her watch.

The printer fell silent. Then it buzzed and clicked for another moment, then was still again. A green light above the door pinged on. At first nobody moved. The Simmons approached the printer and opened the door. He peered into the darkness inside. He frowned.

Isaac shuffled forwards and reached into the printer's dim interior. When he withdrew his hand it was holding a single red rose. Without a word, eyes glued to the floor, he walked up to Alice and presented it to her. The rose was moist with dew, as if freshly picked on a summer morning, and delicately fragrant. Isaac stared at the floor, twisting his hands.

"Thank you," said Alice, blushing in her turn as the assembled scientists stared at her. A long, silent moment passed.

"Can somebody explain to me what just happened?" said Simmons finally.

Before anybody could speak, the door crashed open and the stout lady from the kitchen marched in. In her hand she was carrying a metal object, about the size of a large pocket calculator, which she plonked down on a console.

"Tell your friend to leave my microwave alone," she shouted, waving a heavy arm at Isaac. "I've told you before. If he breaks it he'll have to pay for another one. I've just opened it now and found this inside. It must have been him because I've seen him messing about with it. Tell him to play with his own toys!"

She stomped out, slamming the door.

"Microwaves," said Isaac.

Alice looked at the metal object on the console and began to understand.

"Simmons," she murmured, "I think you might be visiting Pluto..."